Roasted Sweet Potato Event Coloring Pages

Fun after digging up sweet potatoes

The Roasted Sweet Potato Event is an autumn event held around November and December at kindergartens, elementary schools, and neighborhood parks.
Everyone roasts the sweet potatoes dug up in autumn over a bonfire of collected fallen leaves, and eats them together.
You dig up the sweet potatoes yourself, and you roast and eat them yourself. That is why they taste so much better than sweet potatoes you just buy at the store!

First, start by collecting fallen leaves

The Roasted Sweet Potato Event does not start with lighting the fire.
Your first job is collecting fallen leaves. You use bamboo brooms and rakes to sweep up the leaves scattered around the schoolyard or park, and make a big pile.
Yellow ginkgo leaves, red maple leaves, and brown cherry or zelkova leaves. If you look closely, leaves of many different shapes are mixed together.
This pile of fallen leaves becomes the fuel for your fire.

Wrap the sweet potatoes in wet newspaper and foil

If you put sweet potatoes straight into the fire, only the outside will burn, and the inside will stay raw.
So, wrap the sweet potato in wet newspaper, and then wrap it tightly with aluminum foil over that.
The water in the newspaper turns to steam, so heat reaches slowly all the way inside the sweet potato. The foil stops the direct flames from touching it.
You do not put the wrapped sweet potatoes into roaring flames. You place them in the embers (red glowing coals) left after the fire burns down.

The slower you roast them, the sweeter they get

It takes about 40 minutes to an hour to finish. That might feel like a long time, but this waiting time is important!
Sweet potatoes contain enzymes that change starch into sweet sugar. These enzymes work best at temperatures between 65 and 80 degrees Celsius.
A leaf bonfire warms up slowly through these temperatures. This lets the enzymes do a lot of work, making the sweet potatoes super sweet.
If you use a microwave, it heats up all at once. The enzymes do not have enough time to work, so the sweet potatoes do not get very sweet.

Check if they are ready with a bamboo skewer

You can tell if they are cooked by poking a bamboo skewer through the foil.
If it goes in smoothly, they are ready! If it feels hard, wait a little longer.
Put on work gloves, take them out, and open the foil. White steam will puff right up! When you break one in half, the inside is yellow and fluffy.
Even though it is cold outside, your hands feel nice and warm. It is the happiest moment of the Roasted Sweet Potato Event!

Flames Change Colors from Bottom to Top

The bonfire flames look better if you do not color them with just one color.
Try making the base yellow, the middle orange, and the tip red, layering the colors a little by little. Just doing that makes them look like they are flickering and burning.
It is a good idea to put a light color on the very tips of the flames, or leave them white.

Leave the Smoke and Steam White

For the rising smoke and the steam from the roasted sweet potatoes, leaving them uncolored and white looks best.
If you really want to add color, use just a tiny bit of light blue or light gray.
If you color the area around them with dark colors, the white parts will start to look like smoke.

Mix 3 or More Colors for the Fallen Leaves

If you color the pile of fallen leaves with the same brown, it will just look like a regular pile.
Ginkgo leaves are yellow, maple leaves are red or orange, and other leaves are brown or dark brown. Coloring each leaf a different color shows how lively the gathered leaves are.
If you make sure leaves of the same color are not next to each other, the pile will look soft and full.

Do Not Color the Aluminum Foil

We recommend leaving the aluminum foil wrapping the potato white.
Try adding just a little bit of light gray along the wrinkle lines. It will start to look shiny and silver.
Color the inside of the split roasted sweet potato with deep yellow or orange. If you make just the edge of the skin reddish-purple, your picture will make people imagine hot, fresh steam.

Slow roasting makes them sweet, thanks to enzymes

Sweet potatoes have an enzyme called beta-amylase inside them. It changes starch into a sweet sugar called maltose.
This enzyme works best at temperatures between about 65 and 80 degrees Celsius. The longer it stays at that temperature, the more sugar it makes, so your sweet potato gets super sweet!
Roasted sweet potatoes made over a bonfire taste so very sweet because they heat up slowly through this temperature zone.

Can you still make a bonfire with fallen leaves?

Actually, a law made in 2001 usually stops people from burning trash outside.
But light fires for daily life, like small bonfires, are allowed as special exceptions. Burning leaves and setting up campfires count as exceptions, too.
Even so, smoke can bother your neighbors, and fires can be dangerous. Because of this, more and more schools do not hold the Roasted Sweet Potato Event anymore.
These days, many places use sweet potato roasters or drum-can ovens instead of open bonfires.

Roasted sweet potatoes are actually a newer way to eat them

Sweet potatoes came to Japan 400 years ago, but selling them as "roasted sweet potatoes" only started in the latter part of the Edo period.
A book written in 1832 called Edo Hanjoki says people roasted and sold sweet potatoes at neighborhood guardhouses from early morning until late at night.
Stone-roasted sweet potatoes, which are cooked on hot stones, started in Tokyo in 1951. People pulling carts and shouting out to sell them became a famous sign of winter in Japanese towns.